Reasons Not to Install Solar Power Panels on Sacramento Homes

Installing solar panels might not add value to your home but it might reduce your expenses.

There is a huge push lately by solar energy companies to install solar power panels on Sacramento homes. Everywhere, I see this. Mostly it’s leases but some owners actually buy their solar panels. One such seller paid a company $30,000 to install microinverter high efficiency energy solar panels. She financed it, of course, and now it needs to be paid in full from her proceeds of sale. The stinker is she won’t get any credit for those solar panels in the home appraisal. Appraisers don’t consider solar power panels on Sacramento homes an upgrade. Solar panels have no value.

No value, people. Of course, that’s not how the solar company sells it to homeowners. They don’t tell you the truth.

On top of this, you’ve got to stop and consider the savings. To recoup that $30,000, if your electric bill runs, say, $200 a month, it would take 12 1/2 years to break even. And that’s assuming there are no repairs to those solar panels over the next 12 1/2 years. No leaking or parts that need to be replaced. Which is probably unheard of.

My husband and I have solar panels on our vacation home in Hawaii. Two of them. About every five years, those tubes need to be replaced at the cost of $1,000 each. That means the solar panels, although paid for, cost us $400 a year. The only appliance run by the solar panels is our water heater. How many hot showers do you take in Hawaii? We wash our clothes mostly in cold water. I guess we pay $400 a year to run our dishwasher, and that seems fairly expensive.

Homeowners with solar panels on Sacramento homes probably do not realize the inherent problem in some neighborhoods lies with pigeons. The woman with the $30,000 solar panels discovered hundreds of pigeons had flocked to her home after the installation of the solar power panels. Pigeon eggs rolled into her gutters, and the gutters clogged. Pigeon feathers, pigeon poop and other disgusting pigeon debris, including dead pigeons, all over her roof and in her gutters. It cost her $2,000 to clean up the mess and install screens to keep the pigeons away.

The kicker in this story is the guy who installs the screens is the sole service provider authorized by the solar power company to perform such work. That’s wrong on so many levels. He told the seller he just follows the birds to the next victim’s home. The person who will make out like a bandit will be the buyer for this seller’s home. She has pigeon barriers installed and a fairly new $30K solar power system that will be absolutely free to the new owner. She pays zero to the electric company.

Other homeowners pay for leases, and they generally do not pay zero to the electric company. They pay a SMUD bill and a lease payment, often an above-market rate charged by SMUD, to the solar power company. They get away with charging more at present than it actually costs because the solar companies claim it’s long term and fixed. This is also why buyers tend to balk at buying homes with solar panel leases. I had one seller remove the solar panel from his home and take it with him, just so he could sell, because nobody wanted to assume his lease.

I’m not saying all solar power panels on Sacramento homes are a ripoff or a bad thing. But I’ve yet to see a homeowner benefit. I remember 10 years ago you could buy solar panels for $6,000 because we contemplated it. Of course, today those would probably be considered bad technology. This is too bad because we desperately need green solutions for our planet.